Personal Equipment Management
ZUGSEIL Personal Equipment Management is a tool, which is used by the the ZUGSEIL Shop and its digital service point (DSP) extension and ZUGSEIL Point of Service by functionliaty for managing personal equipment of staff members.
Use cases & Functionality
PEM covers functionality for processes like:
- digital uniform store - users can manage process of personal equipment like ordering, triggering returns, book appointments and support, triggering returne, book appointments with equipment specialistst, perform online measuring in, ... all processes required for self service for a staff member's equipment.
General features
a Digital Staff Equipment Store .
This digital equipment store delivers
It allows an organization to
- create and maintain personal equipment accounts, which staff members or team leaders can use to (self-) manage personal equipment of the staff members.
- define and enforce sophisticated rulesets which precisely define the mandatory and optional equipment for the each working position.
- define and enforce budgets
- enable central controlling of equipment state and spending
Benefits of Personal Equipment Management
There are many reasons, why organizing these processes is essential for most types of organizations:
Staff security
Each organization is responsible for the security of their employees while they are getting their job done. Each job has its own risk profile, for which certain personal protective equipment (PPE) in many cases regulated by law. In all cases companies must compensate employees for damages they suffer delivering their work, which is a major risk. In cases, where there is evidence that the employee`s manager did fail on ensuring the security of their staff even legal action against managers of the employer has been seen.
Reduce unnecessary spending
Especially small organizations think that managing the procurement of personal equipment makes no sense for them. This is wrong! Every organization should find a way to equip their staff adequately and effectively at the best price and avoid unnecessary expense. To achieve this, the staff responsible for the management of personal equipment must have all these information at hand at any interaction with members of staff:
1. Information on the job profile of the staff member
2. Information on the adequate equipment for the staff member
3. Information on the inventory of the staff member
4. Information on the age of the inventory of the staff (handout history)
5. Information, what items the organization has currently on stock and eventually how fast items can be procured
6. Information, where these items can be procured at the best price
Only when this information are available, the equipment manager can make optimal decisions. Without having a management tool this is impossible – and especially small organizations ignore this as they fear dysproportional software expenses. They pay this fear with either high risks for the employee or the organization, too high expense for local stock or even falling short of legal regulations!
We regularly see that small organizations try to circumvent this by handing over the responsibility to their employees themselves by providing money or coupons with preselected suppliers. This has many downsides: Maverick buying, Money being spent for relatives once they have unused budget, employees know knowing exactly what they require for their personal security, … amongst many more.
Enforce corporate identity und improve public image
It is not only a matter of style why it makes sense that employees dress according to their corporate identity. Looking sharp and feeling as part of an organization can not only make customers having a good impression of your organization as your employees are representatives of your organization. It can deliver a strong feeling of being tied to the organization and being proud of being part of the organization.
Making sure that your team is dressed well and the equipment is always in proper share may deliver value to your organization, which you have not thought about before.
Reduce abuse risk
Clothing makes people! Certain equipment you hand our to your staff may allow them to be easily recognized by everybody, e.g. police uniforms, airline staff uniforms, army uniforms, … . If this equipment gets to the wrong hands, this equipment may make it easier for unwanted people to access to areas, where they should not have access to. To avoid that it is essential to have fully transparency over who has what – and even more important what he has to return when leaving the company.
Improved ecological footprint
When equipment is returned, e.g. when people are leaving the company, not all items of personal equipment may have reached their end of life. In order to save money as well as transforming the organization toward better sustainability and reducing the carbon footprint of the organization, reuse of certain products should be considered!
Features of Personal Equipment Management
Personal Equipment Account Management is a major extension of ZUGSEIL Shop delivering a lot of tools and value for our customers. The core of personal equipment account management is the ability for personal equipment accounts. ZUGSEIL handles them like bank accounts, exactly documenting items added or removed from the entitlement accounts. Each of the accounts can be either quantity based (How many of this item may be handed out?) or Budget-Based (How much budget is available for which timeframe?). In order to maintain this regular pointruns are possible by highly customizable rulesets. You can find more informaiton on this topic in this article..
Personal Equipment ordering Assistant (PEA)
This is the assistant which:
- makes it easy for staff members to order the appropriate equipment.
- makes it almost impossible to place unwanted or incorrect orders for their personal equipment
It supports the user by reducing the available products to the appropriate ones, depending on freely definable rulesets based on gender, job-profile, regionalization, employment level, organization unit, ... and many more. In the personal equipment ordering screen the user only sees equipment items relevant for his/her personal equipment. PEA also includes a detailed personal equipment account overview making it possible to trigger other transactions from within the PEA like documentation of losses, find/ or administrative bookings to handle exceptions.
Personal Master Data Management
PEA uses data from HR and amongst other information to evaluate the ideal personal equipment for the user. In most scenarios these information are feeded by leading HR or ERP systems. In cases where these systems dont exist, these data can be managed from the Personal Master Data Management tool.
Personal Equipment Information Services
Personal Equipment is not only about ordering and managing personal equipment. It is also about providing information on personal equipment to the users. Typical information are wearing guidelines, handling advice, news regarding equipment. Also these services come up with hint upon logging on like “Hey, do your fire protection jacket requires a service!”. You can find more informaiton on this topic in this article.
Appointment Booking App
With ZUGSEIL most process of the personal equipment management can be automated of be done by the staff member in self service. Still, many organizations offer to their staff members to go to a point-of-service for immediate exchange/repair or measuring in or other staff related activities. ZUGSEIL offers a tool for making appointments on static or mobile service points through the Appointment Booking App. You can find more information on this topic in this article.
Measuring In / Size Recognition App
Personal equipment depends on the shape and capabilities of the persons body. Getting the correct variant of personal equipment (e.g. size) takes resources. ZUGSEIL has its own size recognition AI based on body measures. To acquire these body measures, ZUGSEIL integrates with 3rd party (also AI driven) mobile apps and body scanners to get exact body measures as basis for the size recognition AI. You can find more information on this topic in this article.
Personal Equipment Returns Management
Although returns can be booked in the personal equipment account history, it sometimes feels more natural to users to have a standalone app not invoked from the shopping process. This is why personal equipment management fully integrates with ZUGSEIL Quality and Returns Management (QRM), allowing the user to also use the regular return processes based on orders or received shipments triggered from the personal equipment account history.
Personal Equipment Account Clearance Processes
In almost all organizations, purchasing or handing out goods requires clearance. Normally the handout is governed by entitlements/budgets associated with the job profiles of staff members and therefore do not need clearance. Still there are scenarios, where the handout of items requires an "equipment clearance", which is not identical with fiscal clearance processes. Good examples are: Clearance for handout of weapons, Clearance for equipment exceptions. You can find more information on this topic in this article.
Personal Equipment Lifecycle Management
Each equipment item can typically has a mean wearing/usage time or a number of refurbishing/laundry cycles after which the product should be serviced or replaced to ensure the proper usability of it. Personal Equipment Lifecycle Tracking adds functionality of PLM to the Equipment Management tool, allowing to track the equipment items over their entire lifecycle with the staff members. This service bundle is ideal, if the customer wants to integrate servicing/refurbishing or laundering processes to their equipment process chains - no matter if the laundry/refurbishing services are delivered by internal or external parties. You can find more information on this topic in this article.
Personal Equipment Controlling Tools
The larger your organization grows, the bigger absolute invest will get. The controlling tools allow you to break-down equipment cost on cost center or organizations. Also you are able to extract detailed information on the equipment accounts of your staff members. You can find more information on this topic in this article.
Job Profile Entitlement Administration App
This application allows organization administrators to setup entitlements which they can bind to HR-base data over a set of dynamic rules, giving our users great flexibility when it comes to defining a rules which govern the personal equipment specifically to the groups of staff in your organization. You can find more information on this topic in this article.
Integrations
It extends the ZUGSEIL Shop and ZUGSEIL Point of Service (POS) service bundles. It integrates seamlessly with:
- ZUGSEIL Quality and Returns Management (QRM),
- ZUGSEIL Lifecycle Management (LCM),
- ZUGSEIL Made To Measure (M2M) and many other service bundles offered by ZUGSEIL.